Oculus Rift Update Prevents Playing Rift Games on Vive

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Last month, Alice reported on a hack that could let HTC Vive users sneak into the Oculus Rift party and play some of their exclusive games including Lucky’s Tale and Oculus Dreamdeck. But last week Oculus rolled out a new update with “platform integrity checks” that had supposedly ended Vive’s party crashing ways — until this weekend when the developer of Revive responded with an update of their own focused on bypassing that DRM.

The handy Revive functioned as a fancy translator that could intercept Oculus-specific functions and reimplement them to be understood by the OpenVR environment that HTC Vive supports. It only translated those functions, meaning that games purchased on the Rift still passed basic validation checks. But after this weekend’s update, Revive is now a tool capable of piracy thanks to circumventing those authorization checks altogether.

“I really didn’t want to go down this path,” the update reads, “but I feel there is no other way.”

Right now, the update only bypasses Oculus’s DRM in games built using Unreal Engine, with Unity being added in a future update.

Oculus representatives were quick to condemn Revive last month, telling Gameindustry.biz that “users should expect that hacked games won’t work indefinitely, as regular software updates to games, apps, and our platform are likely to break hacked software.”

Last week they made good on that promise and tossed all the HTC Vive party crashers to the curb. In an interview with Motherboard, Revive creator ‘LibreVR’ explained that the update works by checking if there’s an Oculus Rift connected to a PC when booting up a Rift exclusive game. Huh. That seems simple.

Oculus shed some light on the recent update in a statement to Gamasutra:

“Our latest software update included several new features, bug fixes and security upgrades, including an update to our entitlement check that we added to curb piracy and protect games and apps that developers have worked so hard to make.”

Oculus’s statement then goes on to clarify that “this update wasn’t targeted at a specific hack,” before reiterating that “we take the security, functionality and integrity of our system software very seriously and people should expect that hacked games won’t work indefinitely as regular updates to content, apps and our platform may break the hacks.”

Five months ago, Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey took to a Reddit thread to say this: “If customers buy a game from us, I don’t care if they mod it to run on whatever they want […] our goal is not to profit by locking people to only our hardware.” But whether Luckey’s statement is a contradiction with Oculus’s official response isn’t clear because of how tightly woven the fabric is between game and platform.

The developer behind Revive contends that “while this helps prevent piracy from people who didn’t buy an Oculus Rift, it doesn’t do anything to prevent piracy from those who did buy an Oculus Rift. And this clearly excludes anyone who bought the game, but didn’t buy an Oculus Rift. Even if Revive wasn’t targeted, they were probably more than aware of the collateral damage.”

But all of that is moot now that Revive can be used to play pirated Rift games on OpenVR headsets, a move that the developer vindicates by affirming “I still do not support piracy, do not use this library for pirated copies.”

Somehow I’m not convinced that’s going to stop those who want to do just that. Either way, this is likely only the second volley in a continuing battle between Oculus and LibreVR. We’ll have to wait to see what Oculus has to say in response to this latest development.

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Which in practice means that Revive can now be used to play pirated games, which it did not originally allow. Since the authentication part was changed to include the check for Rift, Revive was practically forced to bypass the authentication part altogether. In a nutshell, as a direct result of Rift’s DRM, Revive now allows playing pirated games as well.

Yeah, pretty much forced him to break the protection. How else would you play the games you bought from the most evilist store on planet earth run by the most evilist of corporations run by Zuckersatan out to eat your babies!

Indeed, if I did have a vive, while I may have been tempted to buy some of these games from the Oculus store, I wouldn’t because there’s a very strong chance that the game would be patched and broken again. There’s no way I would spend money when someone is actively trying to break what I pay for, so I would just pirate it anyway, guaranteeing a lost sale.

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Wish there was a good VR from a corporation that doesn’t treat the gamers like trash with this exclusive nonsense. I don’t want to give Facebook my money, nor do I want to support Valve because they do nothing but try to screw over gamers these days. Shame we finally have VR gaming and the corporations making the headsets are screwing it up.

Valve doesn’t make headsets. Valve makes Steam. HTC makes the Vive. Valve certainly worked with HTC to help make the Vive because they do have some knowledge in games, but at the end of the day it is HTC headset. They built it. They take the profits. The Vive happily works without Steam. So lucky day for you, there exists a non-evil company making headsets. That company is HTC and they made a very nice piece of equipment that I think I am going to pop on in just a few minutes.

SteamVR works with Rift and Vive, Valve is being all-inclusive, not exclusive. I’m not sure what you’re on about suggesting Valve is out to screw customers, they’re probably the most customer-friendly company you’ll find by a wide margin, at their level of valuation.

So is there anybody who actually likes the Rift and was also happy with its roll-out?

Although I pretty much noped out at the Facebook acquisition, I was willing to revisit it depending on how things progressed. But it seems like any positive reactions are submerged at the bottom of a lake full of piss and vinegar.

Yep, I’m cool with it. Obviously some people are pissed off, but… if you want Oculus – buy it. I don’t buy games working through 3rd party workarounds and if I do pirate them for whatever reason – I have enough shreds of respect to the creators not to whine when they stop working.

Firstly, if that’s their policy, they should have said so, rather than implying they’re open to their software running on other headsets and then flipping their stance after that became a possibility.

Secondly, hardware-exclusive games are fucking stupid, especially with both HMDs running on the same types of PCs. The cracking teams are always going to work faster than Oculus anyway, it’s an exercise in futility.

Firstly – if you bought the game and you use it through THIRD PARTY API than you should realize the risks involved. What happens here is exactly one of them. So stop pretending you are shocked or surprised, it’s pretty much a standard outcome of using community-built workarounds.

And secondly – from a developer point of view hardware-exclusive games make perfect sense and save a lot of development time, not to mention saving a little bit of up front investment. And if you are so confident in cracking teams then why all the whining in this thread? If it’s really a non-issue as you think, then there’s nothing to complain about.

It might have made sense in an established market, it’s questionable at best in the fragile VR environment.
Plus, they specifically stated that they wouldn’t stop people from using mods to play Rift exclusive games. So, people who own a Vive and legally bought a Rift exclusive game based on that promise are probably a bit pissed off right now.

To me it seems that Oculus/FB feels like they are losing the Hardware race and are trying the walled garden approach as a desperate measure. With any luck this will speed up their decline and lead to HMDs becoming just another peripheral, with an open API.

Rift owners are happy. This only affects people who didn’t buy the Rift. Having used both a Vive and the Rift, I personally think the Rift is a better HMD. Motion controls on the Vive are great, but I can wait a few months for Oculus’ version or for the Vive’s controls to come to Oculus.

The only reason this is an issue at all is that Oculus Home created some fantastic stuff for their customers. SteamVR’s has a few great games/experiences too, but I think Oculus Home has better content.

tl;dr people cancelled their pre-orders for the Rift and got a Vive, and are now upset they aren’t being treated like Rift customers. The majority of people using this software are doing so to play the free exclusives that are Rift only, which they are not entitled to. But, you know, principles and stuff make it ok to crack software I’m not entitled too, because Facebook and DRM, or something.

“VR” should not be hardware locked. Buying a HMD should be no different to buying a new gpu/monitor/controller. I understand there are differences in the hardware, but surely not a lot that can’t be abstracted out into configuration options by developers.

Rift is trying to become a monopoly. I don’t care which is “better” or has “more content”, this is bad practice. Bad for VR as a format, bad for everyone.

But it is different. It’s not comparable to other components as it’s a platform on its own right, with both devices having different setup, supporting different features, and using different store fronts. It’s quite natural that every company wants to push the bleeding edge solutions they can provide to the customer.

“But it is different.” No , sorry, it isn’t. It is a hardware with drivers and abstraction on the OS layer. It should be transparent which software want to use it as long as the abstraction is good enough. This is PC, not console or smart phone. We don’t take kindly of being told by hardware maker which sort of software we are allowed to use. Thing is, FB saw a possibility of walled garden and went for it. In all practical purpose baring having a stake it is clear for anybody looking at the situation impartially.

Plus doesn’t support all the features and makes it more annoying as you have to assure your game works great on all the devices instead of one you target (which is much easier if you work on vive-only or oculus-only game).

I don’t think so. Did you forget that we are talking about PC gaming in the first place, where your game is expected to function on both Nvidia and AMD giraffics and suchforth? Of course your game should work on monitors with different resolutions, and so forth. I’m quite certain any developer would tell you making a game work with multiple VR systems isn’t much more of a challenge than that.

VR headsets are not GPUs. From a dev point of view they are more similar to a dedicated console than making sure your game runs on this GPU or the other (though GameWorks is somewhat more comparable, and that’s not really supported by AMD anyway)

But it’s worth noting that titles using OpenVR will indeed run on the Vive, the Oculus DK2, the Oculus CV1, and the Razer OSVR headset, which is pretty much all the current headsets. If they require motion controls, this can be accomplished with Vive controllers, Razer Hydra, or Leap Motion, though the latter two aren’t ideal. You can even use an Android device on Google Cardboard with it, using a program called VRidge Riftcat, though the experience is, shall we say, imperfect.

Facebook dropped a couple billion on Oculus. They coulda bought Minecraft for that kina money. Instead, they got VR. That turned Oculus from hardware into a platform. So Facebook’s business model for VR is the Xbox: Microsoft-driven hardware leading to a walled garden, adoption driven by the “killer app”. So they ramp up exclusives.
Valve’s model is that VR is a peripheral that will drive a new class of games. So they partner with hardware companies who, for a fraction of FB’s 2 Bil, can get a shot at leading a new market.
Oculus is selling more than they’re delivering, so the fight is just getting started.

If you read the whole threads cinek is very invested into having occulus as a plateform rather than peripheral, and he is very interrested into repeating that point. He seem to fail to see that most PC user, including developper like me do not want exclusive “plateform” but peripheral.

IMO long term Occulus set back VR with this little war. 2 colleagues at work were speaking on how they did not know to chose which, but that now they decided to chose neither until the dust settle.

Yeah, well done Oculus, because that’s what you need to do to convince people to buy VR, make it needlessly exclusive. You’re already struggling to convince people VR is a worthwhile purchase with the content you have…so why don’t you go ahead and limit it even further by trying to limit accessibility…idiots.

I’m trying really hard, but was thus far unsuccessful in coming up with a more effective way of screwing up a new and fragile technology like VR than stuff like this.

Dividing different implementations of a similar concept by stuffing them into walled gardens and actively attacking efforts to increase interoperability is just ridiculous. It artificially locks out potential buyers of specific games and thus reduces the overall user-base, the very thing VR could really use if it’s supposed to gain any momentum in the mainstream market in coming years.

Dishing out 700+€ for a VR-headset and still merely having access to a subset of the available VR-games feels insulting. At least if the limitations are of political nature, and not based on technical differences. Not impressed by the decision by the Oculus-team. All that work going into the inevitable DRM-cat-and-mouse-game between them and revive would be better spent creating/improving standardized APIs (which could actually benefit both developers and VR-customers). Seems shortsighted.

“Better” means something different to investors than consumers. Better for them that half as many games are sold, all of them on Rift, than a larger market with competitors. Platform capitalism forever!

Bloody stupid decision, unless the FB people are really that confidant that VR is going to make so much money.

I mean if it was something that was ubiquitous i’d expect it, but the VR market is fragile as fuck, it could easily end up as a multi billion dollar loss for everyone involved, in that situation I cannot fathom why you’d want to do something to restrict the market.

That is only true if you are not setting back the market. If people start to shift back any VR buying because of this little war, to give you an example of what could happen if people wise up on what’s going on here is : e.g. 50% of “great ! you should try it” of 500K sales and that is WAY better than 100% of “avoid it until the VR war is over” 100K sale.

A lot of the predictions I had for VR have gone to the wall, mostly because neither Vive nor Oculus had the balls to price aggressively and soak the loss to get a large enough market share to really drive VR in the first round. Right now VR is -very- niche. It’s a very pleasant niche for those willing to risk it, but for the bulk of people it’s a case of “Way too rich for my blood”

Oculus THEN go and, rather than working with other vendors to improve interoperability and standardising the APIs, you know, like DirectX but this time people can work together to get it right so it’s more like OpenGL but gets adopted the first time around instead of waiting for MS to come up with say, DirectVR/AR or worse DirectXAVR because clearly we need something that sounds like the Xmen by microsoft.

Bleugh.

Oculus, I hope you die in the fires of your own hubris so vendors can focus on OpenVR, get that squared away and then Carmack can work on this properly and get Virtual Reality where it needs to be. Zuckerburg can fuck right off back to Facebookland. I initially thought he might have been the “least worst” option, but that assessment is rapidly changing.

I’m in a similar situation, Vive’s setup just isn’t practical (Or possible) for me so the Rift’s desktop solution suits me perfectly fine.

Even have an order that *might* get filled sometime in August (Not holding my breath), but all this drama is making me nervous. Might cancel my order and wait to see if this crap subsides or manages to kill of VR’s potential.

Vive works for room-scale, seated, and stationary standing games. Rift only works for the latter two at the moment. You’ll want motion controllers either way, so it’s only a matter of whether you want to wait to buy those or have them included in the box.

Pointless exclusivity is an excellent way to make sure I wait until either everyone’s adopted the open standard or the exclusive folks are the last ones standing. I’m not going to be the VR equivalent of the guy that invested in Betamax or HD-DVD, thanks. It also seems likely to make sure those games don’t survive into posterity. Look at all the trouble people’ve had getting Glide games to run in this 3dfx-less future.

What a rediculous hardware war. At the end of the day this is a PC peripheral, a display / interface device.
Imagine if different monitor / mouse manufacturers started dictating which games could be played on which hardware. Even nVidia / AMD don’t pull this rubbish and their hardware affects what can be played far more.
It’s moronic

Certainly nvidia never introduced a proprietary frame rate synchronization technology. They definitely never provided physics acceleration APIs that can use your GPU, but then deliberately disabled them if the GPU isn’t made by them…

While PhysX is mostly dead (or at least relegated to “novelty” status at this point), GSync still seems to be going strong and dividing the market.

I’m going to play devil’s advocate here and say why the hell should Oculus self-fund the development of VR games if people are just going to play them on the Vive? It doesn’t strike me as that unreasonable for them to expect some kind of return on their investment. It would be like if one of Sony’s internal studios made a game and then everybody just played it on Xbox anyway. It would be a completely wasteful and idiotic way to run a business.

Not that I expect anyone to care about that stuff. Defending platform exclusivity is a completely futile argument, considering there isn’t even remotely a consensus among the gaming community on whether people should even bother paying for games in the first place, even DRM-free ones from struggling indie studios. So this is just totally pissing into the wind.

Well, because they’d make more money and a bigger return on their investment for software if they expand their customer base. Supposedly they’re selling the hardware at cost, so I’m not really sure what their motivations could be in rejecting people’s money.

If you fund a game you can make your money back through profits. It is more difficult making a profit during the early period although you can also start a major franchise doing that. If Sony invest in a movie – would they then move it straight to blue-ray then limit it to Sony only TV’s?

If the investment is not viable without anti-competitive behavior it is a choice to make. So it’s saying to consumers – do you fear us enough to buy us or are you going to run to our competitors or just stay out of the market? Whatever model you go for you are paying top notch money for a fairly bulky heavy piece of kit as an early adopter and are going to think very carefully about it.

I would also say that people who do buy in early tend to be very emotionally invested in their decision. They wouldn’t be an early adopter unless they really cared about this area. So seeing a company try to damage the future of a technology in my view is likely to either lesson that factor or send people to the competitor.

Sorry for wall of text. I’m in the wait and see camp personally, although in the highly unlikely event that this strategy pays off and just Occulus survives I will wait until next gen and a new competitor.

Content Exclusivity is used to try to entice people to buy your kit. However, it is NOT the best way to obtain a return on investment as you are limiting your potential customer base, and hence reducing profits.

The big boys (Sony and Microsoft) can afford to do this, but for people in a tiny market, this seems an incredibly dangerous move. Even in the mass console market, game exclusivity is usually only for a limited period as your loss of profits from maintaining that exclusivity is too high.

So the excuse that Oculus want to get the highest return on their investment of supporting these games, doesn’t really hold water. They are trying to use the exclusivity to push people into buying their kit. Unfortunately for them PC gamers are far less tolerant of this sort of thing then console gamers (who have been used to it since the days of Nintendo vs Sega or Commodore vs Amiga), and it will probably have the effect of pushing people to their competition.

Admittedly, they have the facebook billions backing them, so they can probably maintain the strategy for a while, but I still don’t see them being particularly successful. Creating workarounds on a PC is significantly easier then on consoles, and VR tech is only a PC peripheral, so they will be fighting a losing battle for years to come…

Wow, lots of thoughtful replies here. Yeah, I’m not sure myself whether or not it’s a healthy idea for Oculus to be pursuing a strategy of platform exclusives when the entire VR market is so vulnerable and unproven. It’s a much riskier strategy than what the console makers do – that’s a mature ecosystem whose basic framework is older than many of their customers. I’m hardly an expert, though – only time will tell.

I guess my point was that given the Oculus exclusives are often exclusives by virtue of Oculus ponying up the cash for the games’ development, I can’t get too bent out of shape that Oculus would want to maintain that exclusivity. I know it’s inconvenient for the consumer, artificial even, but I try to go beyond reflexive condemnation and understand the rational reasons why companies do things even when it’s an annoyance for the end-user.

And I don’t feel like the game community really puts hardly any thought into that kind of stuff. Like how everyone resents Origin, and I understand why, but if I worked for EA I don’t think I’d advocate for paying Valve 20% of revenues in perpetuity either, when the company has more than enough resources to create their own digital distribution platform.

Or like how people complained about Bayonetta 2’s Wii U exclusivity when it was abundantly clear that without Nintendo’s investment there would never even have been a Bayonetta 2. I think it’s valuable to try to understand why things are the way they are, even when they’re personally irritating, rather than falling back on simplistic cries of “evil” or “stupid”.

The issue I have is that with Facebook bankrolling Oculus, there was no need for platform exclusives in the first place, Oculus should have threw their lot in with OpenVR and standardised on a set of protocols that everyone could have used regardless of headset and then worked on producing superior hardware.

Fighting over the software side is more or less entirely insane unless you’re someone with a franchise that’s large enough that you can FORCE customers to use whatever locked down platform you have to hand, such as EA and Origin. Of course, that only works for those franchises, a lot of people will still get all the other games from their preferred location which is Steam or GOG.

Oculus didn’t need to go down this route, but they have, and they only way they can realistically prevent these kinds of things from going on is to implement *denuvo* into their libraries and games from end to end so they can’t be reverse engineered or tampered with but I can just imagine how that’d look.

Aye, and that would be a nice big PR disaster right in time for it to be pointless, since it seems DRM fans decided to react to 3DM’s announcement they were taking a year off from cracking games with sneering ridicule that they were just scared of Denuvo…prompting them to cancel their year off explicitly to throw everything they have into cracking Denuvo. Insert facepalm gif here.

Honestly at first I was pretty much set on buying a Rift with my PC upgrade next year, I thought Valve were being pretty dickish by waiting for Oculus to take the risk and create the market before stepping in and trying to eat Oculus’ lunch and I wasn’t fussed about “room scale” nonsense…then Oculus got into bed with Facebook, and now they’re pushing platform exclusivity BS. Ugh, why do corporations have to keep ruining technological advancement.

And it is the better choice at the moment if you can afford the space for the roomscale experience (1.5m x 2m). After using my vive in roomscale I don’t _want_ anything else. The idea to use an xbox controller and to remain seated feels unbelievably limiting for me.

On one hand I really like that Oculus are putting money into making high quality VR games, and I can understand that they want returns on this investment through platform exclusivity, but at the same time I’m not wild about console business models encroaching on the PC. I would happily pay a lot to be able to play these games on the Vive, like the 3 big budget titles announced by….Ubisoft, was it?

This article is a good summary. PCWorld has some high quality stuff, they had great articles about Pillars of Eternity just before launch.link to pcworld.com

I ‘almost’ feel sorry for Palmer Luckey, I think he genuinely meant what he wrote on that reddit thread.
Unfortunately, he failed to take into account that what he wants is fine as long as it’s also what Facebook wants. He’s the perfect face for the product, it’s his baby after all, but I doubt he has any serious sway any more.

I’m excited by the technology, but £400 for a peripheral is already a ‘tooth dryer’ for most people. Gating an already limited amount of content to a single device so early in the development of VR is stupid and could even be harmful to it’s uptake.

Trying to prevent pirate software is understandable, but to prevent other hardware being used strikes me as a very console-centric, closed garden, view. The kind of people who are early adopters of this tech won’t tolerate it, and have the skills to work around it.

Sounds like a really smart move. Especially after stating the intention of not stopping other peripherals from working with Rift games.
Hey FB, how about writing the initial game development money off and just focussing on improving the hardware? Otherwise, please fail miserably.

Steam and the Vive are the future of VR.
FB and Oculus realize they have a straight-up inferior product, and are trying desperately to make it up through software exclusivity.
Luckily, today’s customers are smarter than that.